


Expectations

by lyndysambora



Series: Expectations [1]
Category: Guns N' Roses
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-20 15:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21284285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyndysambora/pseuds/lyndysambora
Summary: It didn’t used to be like this. He was never one to wait. Or do what was expected of him.
Relationships: Axl Rose/Izzy Stradlin
Series: Expectations [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1534322
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Expectations

Izzy sits on the edge of his seat, elbows on his knees, cigarette wedged in his fingers, and waits.

That phantom thought he can’t quite feel the edges of, that he is never really sure anymore exactly _what_ he is always waiting for, skitters at the edge of his mind again. But he waits. It is what is expected of him now, and it is partly his fault. It’s a precedent he’s set, reporting early and waiting in the steel sepulcher of the bus for the others to drift in.

It didn’t used to be like this. He was never one to wait. Or do what was expected of him. He puts the cigarette to his lips and drags on it, holds the smoke inside him until it disappears and there is nothing left to exhale. 

Once upon a time, he was a rebel. Defying shit-town expectations on purpose. But it didn’t stop at shit-town-- everywhere Izzy had gone in his life, and everybody he’d ever known had had expectations for him, and he’d managed to fuck every single one of those expectations sideways. It felt fantastic, like fucking freedom to know that he didn’t have to be like everyone else on this ugly planet, that he could _choose_ to be different in any way he wanted. All ways, big and small. Nobody could control him.

Then one evening, while he sat on the edge of his bed with a needle in one hand, and a belt garroting the opposite arm, wondering if he could even find a viable vein, it occurred to him that if he made a point to defy everybody’s expectations for him, he was still being controlled by them. He was a fucking marionette, bouncing on strings of expectation either way-- abiding by, or rebelling against, them, they still fucking owned him.

He had loosened the belt and cried for awhile, and then he’d gone ahead and shot up anyway. That was the first night he and Axl had kissed.

\----------------------------------------

Axl was smashed already, on something Izzy could smell across the room, and was pissed off about something Izzy didn’t care to know about. Axl was always pissed off anymore, and at some point in time, Izzy had given up giving a shit about it. Or at least he had convinced himself he’d given up giving a shit about it. The heroin helped with that, like it helped with so many other things.

“Shut the fuck up,” he heard himself saying, but it sounded far away, and he didn’t recognize his own voice.

“Fuck off, you worthless piece of shit. Slam another one,” Axl said. “Or did you run out already?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you check your crystal ball for me and find out?”

A hard blow landed on the side of Izzy’s thigh, that he thought might have been the sole of Axl’s boot, but he wasn’t sure, as it didn’t much hurt. Something told him it should have, though, and that he was going to have tread-shaped bruises there tomorrow. 

He grinned a little, and the movement felt foreign to the muscles of his face. “Why you only mess with me when I’m fucked up, man?”

“Cuz there ain’t no fucking other time.”

“I think you’re just a pussy.”

Another blow, this one in the stomach. This one did hurt, but Izzy refused to show it. 

“Go back to your own fucking room, Axl. Why’re you here?”

“Fucking everyone’s here, and you’re asking me?”

It took a moment to sink in, but Izzy remembered that there was a party happening in his suite, just beyond the door of the bedroom he’d retreated to. 

“Go get laid or something. I’m too tired to deal with your shit.”

“Tired. Is that what it’s called now?”

“Fuck off.”

A relative silence coagulated between them, though the ruckus of music and voices permeated the walls. Izzy wasn’t even entirely sure if Axl was still there or not when he said, “So why are you here?”

It was a small surprise when there was an answer. “Because I fucking hate everyone out there.”

“You hate me, too.”

Silence again, then Axl slumped next to Izzy on the bed. “I don’t hate you,” he said, so softly Izzy barely heard it. “I think you’re a fucking waste of space, but I don’t hate you.”

“The fuck is that, a love letter? Sounds like hate to me.”

“It should be hate, after that fucking crystal ball remark.”

When an accidental laugh hiccuped from Izzy’s throat, Axl added, “You said you wouldn’t use that shit against me, you asshole. Funny, when we talk about it alone, you’re interested.”

Izzy flicked a hand, as if to wave it away as unimportant, but the truth was he had no answer. Instead, he said, “So why do you hate everyone this time?”

“Cuz they’re fucking idiots. Every last one of them.”

“Can you narrow it down?”

“They’re out there talking about what vegetable is the smartest.”

“You’re making that up.”

“I fucking wish I was making it up. Jesus Christ.”

“So which vegetable won?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll bet a fucking sweet potato would smoke any one of those fuckers on Jeopardy.”

This time the laugh that came out of Izzy shook his whole body. When Axl spoke again, it sounded like he was smiling, at least. 

“For fuck’s sake. It’s not funny.”

“It is, though.”

Axl sighed. “Do you think I’m crazy?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I’m serious.”

“You mean like, for real? Like, straitjacket crazy?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think so. Do you think you’re crazy?”

“No.”

“What makes you say it, then?”

“Fucking Slash. Called me psycho, man.”

“You’re not a psycho. You just need to lighten the fuck up. Get you a new pussy or two.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah. You’re gonna give yourself a heart attack time you’re forty, you don’t stop being pissed off all the time.”

“You’re one to talk about being pissed off.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Don’t see too many happy people shooting up smack, do you?”

“Meh. Fuck off,” Izzy groaned. He closed his eyes and sent a prayer up to nobody in particular that Axl would heed the request. But he didn’t. He said,

“Maybe you’re the one who needs to get laid. I ain’t seen you with a chick in-- I don’t know--”

“Too busy being pissed off and shooting up smack.”

“Funny.”

Izzy rolled his head to face the other man and did his best to fix him with a hardened glare, but even from the inside, he knew his eyes were glazed and disoriented. “You know how long it takes me to get a fucking hard-on anymore?” Something in him told him he should regret saying it out loud, and that he should stop, but he didn’t, on either count. “I can eat ‘em, and do fingers and shit, and they think I’m being romantic, but I still don’t care anymore. Easier not to bother.”

For a long moment-- maybe minutes, Izzy didn‘t know anymore-- he was convinced Axl wasn‘t going to respond to the spontaneous confession. But the other man’s voice was tentative in a way that Izzy thought he might have just been imagining, when he said, 

“Why do you keep doing it?”

Izzy sighed. “It’s better than sex.”

“You’re bitching about your limp dick, but it’s better than sex? Shit, man. See what I mean? Fucking waste of space. Even your dick is wasting space now.”

Laughter boiled up in Izzy’s chest and spilled out of him so thoroughly, he wasn’t sure it even came from himself, until he felt the dampness of tears on his temples. 

“Not as much space as it used to,” he said. And this time, Axl laughed.

The smile hadn’t even faded from Izzy’s mouth when Axl said, “I don’t wanna go back out there, man. Fucking lonely out there.”

“Then don’t. Keep me company.”

Izzy closed his eyes and sighed, a deep release that felt as if it would bring sleep along at the end of it, but his mind still swirled behind the cover of his eyelids. His mind was stubborn that way, refusing to surrender power, even after his body had. He was aware of shifting next to him, Axl being his agitated self, despite the gallons of alcohol in him. 

“What is it?” Izzy mumbled. 

“I don’t want you to die.”

To his own surprise, this brought Izzy’s eyes open. “I’m not gonna die.”

“Yes, you are. You’re gonna fuck around one too many times, and we’re gonna find you fucking dead.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to stop.”

“So what else is new?”

“Can you just fucking listen to me for once?”

“I have to listen to you all the goddamn time, don’t I?”

“Not when it fucking matters, you don’t.”

Izzy sighed again, but this time there was no sleep threatening behind it. When Axl spoke again, his words were clipped, like he was explaining something to a child-- or like he was attempting to keep his voice even.

“I don’t want you to die. You need to get clean.”

“And what if I can’t?”

“You can. And you will.”

Izzy snorted, but the words diffused through him, and for the first time in as long as his memory went back, there was a scrap of something there, a remembrance of what it was like to have choices. 

He gathered his strength and pulled himself over onto his side, facing Axl, who was already facing him. The other man had his elbow tucked up under his head and, though Izzy was far from being the best judge of it at that moment, his eyes looked pretty clear for being smashed. Maybe he wasn’t that smashed after all. 

“How do you know?” Izzy said.

Axl grinned. “Saw it in the crystal ball, motherfucker. How do you think I know?”

\----------------------------------------

Izzy pulls the last bit of smoke out of his cigarette and crushes the life out of the remnants of it. Whenever he thinks back and tries to remember, he is never sure which one of them made the first move. Or if it was entirely mutual. The only thing he knows is that they somehow ended up kissing, a slow, deep thing, like suffocating men drawing air and life from a source they hadn’t realized had been available to them all along.

And he had gotten clean. It wasn’t the next day or the day after, or the next month. But he had gotten clean. And there had been a handful of times since that night-- that night when Axl had talked about limp dicks, and vegetables on Jeopardy, and how he didn’t want Izzy to die-- that they had found themselves alone together and kissed, and sometimes touched. There was even a time, shortly after Izzy had gotten clean, when it had gone further than that, but they never talked about it after. Izzy barely allows himself to think about it. It’s only expected that he would want to think about it, that he would need to. But right now, it’s also expected that he and Axl will never be friends. That they are tragically disparate people doomed to mutual hatred. 

And Izzy is tired of expectations. In all the forms they take. So he clears his mind of it all, except the idea of how fantastic another cigarette would be, and how fantastic it would be to be under no expectations at all anymore.

He strikes the lighter and watches the cherry form at the end of a new cigarette as he pulls in his breath, and he decides that, yeah, he’s gonna be done with it. The whole thing. The band, this bus, the fucking _waiting_. And Axl, wherever he is this moment. Izzy almost sends up another one of those non-prayers, this one an entreaty that the other man will remember what it’s like to have choices, too. 

Then he exhales and waits a little longer.

**END**


End file.
